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Obsessive Compulsive Makeup Lip Tars: My New Obsession

If you’ve been reading Product Girl for awhile, you probably know that I just love me some lip stains. I go gaga for lip stains, trying all shades and brands I can get my hands on. I still love lip stains but a new product has come along and it’s truly rocked my world… I love them that much. Say hello to Obsessive Compulsive’s Lip Tars.

Don’t let the name or the shades scare you away because when you give Lip Tars a chance, you’ll love them as much as I do. So what’s great about Lip Tars? Well, how about the wear? I was amazed the first time I tried them, they wore like a stain but I had all the coverage of a lipstick on my lips. Then I realized these Lip Tars didn’t dry out my lips like those 8-hour lip colors.

As an added bonus, they are packed with pigment and are super concentrated. When I first tried to apply a Lip Tar, I foolishly squeezed out enough product as though it was lip gloss. Big mistake! I ended up with entirely too much product and it just made the application harder than it needed to be. What I didn’t realize is that the consistency of this product is very thin, yes… sort of like a lip stain. The key with a Lip Tar is to start small, start with a drop of color and work your way up. Otherwise, if you have too much product on your lips, you are prone to bleeding and feathering and you definitely do not want that.

Formula and wear aside, what’s really great about Obsessive Compulsive’s Lip Tars is that they give me the chance to unleash my inner makeup artist and custom mix my own lip color on the spot. With a little color theory knowledge and some basic shades, just imagine what you could do! Here’s a shade I mixed myself. I started with a drop of Anime (magenta) and Traffic (yellow) as seen here.

What you don’t see here is that I wasn’t really loving the shade I was getting from my little concoction. To fix that, I decided to add in a drop of Katricia (purple) and Feathered (white) to my mix and work it in. After I mixed in all the color, I came up with the color you see here. What do you think?

I put on the color and thought…”Hmm, this is missing something” so I decided to add in a wee bit of shimmer to my new lip color. I decided to mix in a little bit of Loose Color Concentrate in Lustre. This did exactly what I wanted it to, it added in a bit of subtle shimmer and lightened my lip color to the coral-ish shade you see here.

It may seem a little impractical to mix your own lip color every time you need to apply some but there are ways around this. The first is to choose a Lip Tar shade that’s a little more your style. If I had to chose a few shades as staples, I’d pick Melange and Granda. Melange is a warm neutral and Grandma is a pink-coral shade. The other option is to mix enough lip color in one batch to last you awhile. In the mixture above, I probably have enough product to last me a few days. To make this portable, I mixed the color in a beauty counter sample container with a lip that snaps shut. With a retractable lip brush… you are good to go.

Really, one of the best things about this product is the fun you have experimenting and mixing new colors. Check out the fun Temptalia had mixing her own shades:

This is my end result. Now, obviously the lighting is a little different here. You can chalk that up to my lack of digital photography skills. Hopefully you can see through that and see the coverage, it’s opaque and has a nice sheen to it, does it not? I’m definitely happy with it and my new obsession is mixing in different pigments (not just Obsessive Compulsive’s) to see what else I can come up with. I’m not the only one who’s inspired either. Check out Jude’s creations. Isn’t that NSFW Lip Tar with Clear Lip Tar mixed with Spectral Loose Colour combo amazing?

Have you tried an Obsessive Compulsive Lip Tar? What do you think of it? What shades do you have? What’s your favorite combination? Tell us all about it in the comments.

Thanks Marilyn! They also have a clear that I think is more emolient. I think adding a little bit of that into a shade would work. I think I’ve read that it doesn’t take away from the pigmentation of the shade, I haven’t tried it myself but I think I will now.